


You Were Never Gone

by GoThruTheStars



Series: No Better Love [3]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bang Bang Kris Letang to the rescue yall, Depression, M/M, a whole shitload of angst, alludes to suicide, authors life is shit, remember when i said part three would be happy?, row row row your boat rapidly through my tears, technically, technically it ends...happy, tw, well i may have lied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 08:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16869913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoThruTheStars/pseuds/GoThruTheStars
Summary: Geno doesn't know what to expect when he walks into the house.He just knows how it used to be theirs - bright and warm and alive with their love - and now its dark and empty and cold, and it's Sid's.





	You Were Never Gone

**Author's Note:**

> I finished this instead of starting research for my ten page that's due in less than a week. 
> 
> Please enjoy.
> 
> (also a massive thank you for everyone who's reviewed I see you and I love you forever you guys encourage me to write every day)

 

_ I felt empty space, never could explain _

_ Like you were erased, never could replace _

_ Now it's so clear with you right here _

 

_ Like you were never gone _

_ Picked up where we left off _

_ Like you were never gone _

 

_ How it's meant to be, you held the key _

_ Now promise me you'll never leave _

_ Time slipped away, we stayed the same _

 

**\-----------------------------------------------**

 

_“How did we get here? Of all places, how was it that you and I ended up here?”_

 

**\--------------------------------------**

 

The house is quiet when he pulls into the driveway. Geno doesn’t know why that surprised him. Like - it’s _Sid’s_ house. It would be much more worrying if it was loud. But then again, right now the only reason Geno can think of for Sid’s house being loud, would be if there were sirens coming from an ambulance, and he really, really doesn’t want to continue to imagine that.

 

He jabs in the gate code with the same panicked daze that he made the drive in, that he undressed in, that he spent half of practice in, ever since he realized that Sid really wasn’t showing up.

 

His key still works in the lock.

 

It’s something that’s - well not surprising really, but it’s- it’s something. It’s like a punch to his stomach, as he almost breaks down the door to get inside, and the inside of Sid’s house is just like the last time he was over, nothing changed to represent the war that they’ve been through.

 

If he had an air in his lungs, he’s sure he’d lose it, but he’s spent the entire drive desperately trying to convince himself that Sid wouldn’t- he isn’t- he _wouldn't,_ this is _Sid-_

 

Sid, who _wouldn’t_ skip practice, and who _wouldn’t_ let home life affect hockey, and who _wouldn’t_ let Geno walk away from him so easily.

 

It’s like all the things that Geno had noticed were finally adding up, and it paints such a terrifying picture. Pain, immeasurable pain that _Geno_ had caused, elongated over months, bottled up with no one to help him (because he hasn’t talked to Flower, or Duper, or Tanger or Taylor or Jack or Nate or literally anyone that Geno knows Sid normally talks to, and it doesn’t surprise him at all).

 

It was something they always had to work on. Geno didn’t really know, in the beginning, but Flower had been working on Sid for a long time, and apparently he helped form this whole group who seemed to try and systematically convince Sid that not talking to anyone about anything ever, is not a good idea.

 

Sid tries to hide his pain. He thinks that to be Captain, he can’t show anything unless it’s positive, and while he’s certainly shown anger before, he’s never shown his grief.

 

Geno’s glad they’ve at least figured out what it does to Sidney, because in doing so they’ve uncovered an excellent motivator to _push_ Sid even when he really doesn’t want to be. Because if they don’t get Sid to talk - well, it tends to lead to something like this.

 

He’s never seen it this bad, maybe, but it still isn’t okay.

 

This isn’t okay.

 

Maybe they both were at fault for the way things ended, but Geno knew all this, he knew what was going on, he saw it every second of everyday, but he fooled himself into believing that he couldn’t say anything because they weren’t together anymore.

 

He recognized it, and did _nothing_.

 

And so now he’s here, standing in the dim living room of Sidney's house, drowning in the empty stillness of it and wondering what exactly he’s going to find when he goes upstairs.

 

Sidney’s car is in the garage. The engine is cold when Zhenya touches it. He tells himself to stop stalling.

 

He didn’t go 90 mph in a 40 just to wander slowly around the house. He sped here because he thought- he pictured Sid-

 

He’s wasting time.

 

Moving across the hardwood floors feels like a crime in itself. His shoes click noisily, and the sound echoes like he’s an intruder, the house not wanting him there, breaking the heavy silence it’s worked so hard to maintain.

 

He has to find Sid though. He has to fix this.

 

It’s dark upstairs. Darker, anyway. The living room had the little bit of dying winter light to let him move around, but the upstairs is shrouded in shadow, and he only avoids hitting the banister by sheer experience.

 

It reminds him of the concussion days, when the entire house was nearly blacked out, and he would try his best to be quiet on his crutches as he tried to figure out how bad that particular bad day was.

 

(It’s been years since then, but he still looks at Sidney standing in uniform, on the ice, and thinks, ‘ _We almost lost you.’)_

 

The bedroom is at the end of the hall. Geno has to force his feet to move, soft sounds on the carpeted floor. He still has his shoes on.

 

Sid would hate that. He used to frown at him and ask him to take them off, and Geno would duck walk all the way over to the shoe rack just to annoy the hell out of him.

 

It’s the only clear thought in his head, and it becomes the farthest thing from his mind when he finally cracks open the door.

 

It’s dark, like the rest of the house. Nearly pitch black from a set of carefully chosen blackout curtains. It’s cold too, cold enough that Geno can tell the heat is off, and that Sid hasn’t had the mindset to turn it on.

 

The noise he makes when he sees him, a small, shivering lump under a mound of blankets, only visible by a small tuft of hair, is something between a whimper and heartbroken moan. Part of it might be relief - relief that, for how bad Sid is, at least he’s _alive_ , and least he didn’t do what Zhenya’s treacherous mind was visualizing - but most of it is love, and it’s pain, and it’s his heart calling out for Sid’s, begging Geno to get closer.

 

He does. He basically leaps across the room, so desperate he is to get closer to Sid. Because he’s seen him, he knows, and it’s like every urge to touch that he’s denied himself in the past months is surging to the surface.

 

Carefully climbing onto the bed he walks on all fours until he’s face to face with Sid, and then lays down, and reaches out for the first time since last December.

 

His heart is breaking to pieces all over again, but he curls around Sid like he’s dying and Sid is the cure. Sid clings to him, and he runs a hand through his hair in a way that Sid used to say he hated, but secretly always seemed to love. He whispers “ _oh my love_ ” to him in broken Russian, because his throat is to tight and his brain is too tired for English. He tugs down the covers, just a little bit, just enough to see Sid’s face, to brush away the single tear there, to make sure Sid can breathe despite Geno doing his best to crush Sidney's face into his chest.

 

Sidney starts sobbing, and Geno is sorry, he’s so, so sorry, “ _Я люблю тебя_ , so sorry, so sorry Sid.”

 

Geno thought that maybe, his heart couldn’t break any further, that he was as low as he could go, but then- then Sid starts _begging him_ to come back and Geno-

 

He did this. He did this, when he didn’t fight for them, when he got complacent, when he stopped listening to what Sid was _really_ saying to him.

 

All those times they fought, it was Geno being afraid of losing Sid, but it was Sid saying _please don’t ever leave,_ saying _I don’t know what to do,_ saying _help me._

 

Sid apologizes, and Geno hushes him, trying desperately to keep it together, to keep both of them together. The love that they had- that they _have_ for each other is not something to give up on. They don’t _have_ to move on. There’s no reason they can’t try again.

 

Sid moves, struggles a bit, so Geno starts to move back, afraid Sidney is trying to escape his arms. Instead, Sid seems to chase after him, and then he’s pressing something to Geno’s palm. It’s metal, heated by time against warm skin, and it’s round but smooth and-

 

And-

 

His throat tightens to the point of being physically painful, but he inhales sharply anyway as the information processes in his brain. Zhenya doesn’t even bother trying to hold back the tears. He just draws Sidney back into his chest, and buries his face in Sid’s hair, and cries.

 

 _‘We aren’t too broken._ ’ He wants to say. _‘We can still have this. We can still be us.’_

 

They cry together, for how long he doesn’t know, but it’s as painful as it is healing. To let his grief and his pain be expressed is new for Zhenya, it’s _raw,_ but he needs it, just as much as Sid needs to held and heard in his own cry for love.

 

It’s so long - hours, days, _years_ \- that they stay together, just holding each other. It’s enough, finally, but it’s also maybe too long. The outside world fades back in with his phone buzzing incessantly in his pocket and Sid almost asleep in his arms. It’s late enough that night has fallen, and Geno is exhausted. He can’t sleep like this, still in his post-practice clothes, shoes on the bed, not even under the covers.

 

And then there’s the team, all of whom about ready to send out a search party, if the urgent texts to his phone are anything to go by.

 

“Sid.” He whispers, shifting a little to press a kiss to his forehead. “Sid, need to get up. You been in here whole time?” He’s still got the ring burning a hole in his hand when Sidney nods. “Okay. We shower and talk, yes? Come. Up.”

 

It takes a lot of manhandling and gentle coaxing, but he does get Sid in the shower. It’s weird, how suddenly different the atmosphere of the room is. It’s is almost normal, after hours of high emotional release, because the actions are so familiar. It isn’t the first time he’s had to coax Sid into the shower when he’s too exhausted to do so on his own, and it’s with gentle hands and soft words that they make it to the bathroom. Only once he’s sure Sid isn’t going to fall, he moves about the room, turning on the bedside lamp and plugging Sid's phone in, then finding him clothes to wear.

 

From the second the phone turns on it doesn’t stop buzzing with incoming texts for a few minutes, and it’s enough to remind him to send out a text to the group chat. The responses flood in instantly, but Geno ignores it for a different text, a singular individual one from Tanger.

 

_‘I’m coming over.’_

 

Sent fifteen minutes ago.

 

He curses and launches of the bed, taking a split second to drop the pile of clothes on the bathroom vanity before he rushes down the stairs.

 

Sure enough, Tanger is standing outside the door, look very much like a frozen popsicle.

 

“You’re a fucking asshole, G.” He snaps the instant Geno opens the door, and pushes him aside to get in the house. G’s barely got the door closed before Letang is storming into the kitchen, yelling at him about the need to answer phones, swearing in English and French and turning on lights.

 

Geno watches him for a few minutes with wide eyes, thinking about how Sid is basically dead on his feet upstairs and wondering why Kris didn’t just barge into the house like he normally does. “Tanger-”

 

“No!” Kris whirls around holding a pan like he’s about to use it to bash Geno's head in, and given how angry he seems, that might be an actual possibility. He takes a step back just to be sure.

 

“No, you have no fucking _clue_ about- do you know how worried I’ve been? How scared the _team_ is? Mario was ten seconds away from calling the police, I had to spend an entire _hour_ on the phone with Marc-Andre to convince him _not_ to get on a plane to Pittsburgh, okay and neither of you answer your _fucking_ phones! I thought- we thought-” Tanger’s face sort of drains of color, and for a few seconds he isn’t really looking at Geno. Then he closes his eyes and shakes his head and turn back to the stove.

 

“No, I’m going to make dinner, and talk to that _idiot_ Captain of mine, and then you two are going to figure out your shit, because _this_ is _not_ happening again.”

 

He opens his mouth to argue, and then watches as Tanger yanks a knife from the block and starts muttering about onions. “Tanger I- sorry.” He finishes lamely, but his voice is wrecked, and it’s sincere enough to make Kris stop what he’s doing and brace himself against the counter. The defenseman just shakes his head and sighs.

 

“Go take care of him, G.” He whispers, and Geno-

 

Well. He doesn’t need to explain why he listens.

 

….

 

Sid’s still in the shower when he enters the bedroom, although the water cuts off a few seconds afterward. G sits on the bed, leaning against the headboard with his eyes closed, just listening to the soft sounds Sid makes as he drys off and gets dressed. It takes longer than normal, but it reminds Geno of those days before this catastrophe of a season, when he would sit in the living room and listen to Sid putter around the kitchen, muttering to himself and singing softly to whatever song if playing through his portable speaker, or all those times Sid would talk in his sleep, mumbling about pucks and face-offs and there was that one memorable time where Sid had an entire conversations about Claude Giroux being a carrot-

 

“Geno?” He’s jerked out of his reverie by Sid’s soft call. His breath catches in his throat as he looks up to see Sidney standing in the doorway of the bedroom, backlit by the bathroom light, hair still damp as it curls around his ears.

 

It makes something deep inside him ache so powerfully, to think he could’ve lost this. He _did_ lose this. He has to swallow before he speaks, and he knows his eyes are wet again.

 

“So.” He pauses, and looks down at his hands. “So I’m think- we maybe talk. Maybe- see what went wrong. Fix.” He slowly slips the ring onto his finger as he speaks, and he knows Sid sees it, knows from the shuttering inhale and the broken expression on his face when Geno looks at him. “Sid?” He asks when the silence takes up too much space.

 

He nods. “Okay, Geno.” Sid whispers, looking so, so exhausted that Geno wants nothing more than to tuck him into bed and wrap him in his arms, but-

 

“Also- um, Tanger downstairs.”

 

There’s another pause, wherein there’s a loud bang and string of swearing heard from the first floor. Sid closes his eyes for a moment and then stares up at the ceiling, muttering. If Geno wasn’t so wrecked, he might be able to smile, because it’s the first _Sid_ thing that he’s seen in months.

 

Sure enough, Sidney marches straight out of the bedroom, and Geno can tell when he gets down to the kitchen because there’s a lot of yelling in French and a lot of Sid _not_ yelling back. At one point Tanger's ranting cuts off abruptly. Geno stays on the bed, just breathing in the scent of Sidney, alive and present in every little thing around him. From the weird amount of pillows on the bed (the lumpy one Sid used to squeeze to his chest at night, the flat one for when he sleeps on his stomach, the firmish one for when he’s on his side or back, and the extremely puffy one for when he reads in bed) to the heavy comforter that’s grey and thick but warm in the winter and cool in the summer and smells like a mixture of Sid’s shampoo, laundry detergent, and for some reason, of pine.

 

He stays there for a while, just to exist in the same space that Sid does, and he _misses_ this so much. He misses _Sid_.

 

 _‘How did I ever let this go?’_ He thinks, staring upwards. The ceiling offers no answers, and he’s left stewing in his own emotions.

 

When he thinks it’s been long enough, he silently makes his way through the hall and down the stair to the kitchen, where he catches Sidney and Tanger locked in a very tight hug that has both them almost definitely crying.

 

And he really, really, doesn’t want to break it up, because that’s a very dicksish thing to do, but-

 

“Sid, I’m think maybe something burning-”

 

The two of them spring apart, very clearly startled, right as the smoke alarms starts going off which has Tanger screaming “SHIT MY ONIONS!”. Sid’s face freezes in horror for a second, and then goes through a very interesting set of emotions before finally settling on hysterical laughter that has his entire body folding in half while Tanger starts yelling at him in french again. Geno manages a smile, just at hearing Sid honking laugh that he hates but Geno thinks is adorable. He knows it’s probably only happening because Sidney is so far beyond physically and emotionally exhausted that Geno doesn’t even know how he’s standing, but it’s okay. He thinks- maybe they’ll be okay.

 

Tanger may also take the next twenty minutes to curse them both out, long after he’s saved his now slightly charred vegetables, but that’s okay too.

 

True his word, Tanger does actually cook for them. He reminds Geno of his mama, how he makes Sid eat even when he tries to beg off being full. He stays to clean up, and only every other sentence is a threat to kill if either of them ever pulls shit like that again, so he’s certainly feeling better about the whole thing.

 

G thinks he might’ve stayed the night, except after dishes are done and everything is cleaned up Tanger turns to say something, and notices the ring on Geno's finger.

 

He leaves pretty quickly after that.

 

Sidney is dead on his feet, swaying on his feet, and Geno feels himself quickly approaching the same state, so he bundles Sid up the stairs and into bed, and only after a few moments hesitation does he change and follow.

 

“Is okay Sid?” He whispers, on his side of the bed, not touching any part of Sid even if his heart sings with the pain of doing so.

 

“No,” Sid whispers back, and while it cracks something inside him, G starts to sit up, ready to sleep downstairs, when Sidney rolls over and plasters himself along Geno's side, curling under his arm and relaxing.

 

“Now it’s okay.”

 

And as Sid sighs gently, slipping into sleep, Geno stares into the darkness. On his hand is the metal band, perfectly fitted, and he spins it around his finger.

 

And wonders.

 

**\--------------------------------**

 

_“Why care about that? What matters is that we’re here together.”_

 

**\------------------------------------**

**Author's Note:**

> At this point, I'm living in that level of stress where nothing matters and I'm just constantly calm and I don't have a drop of caffeine in me so let's see if I live to finish this series. Also, I recently realized it was a little dumb to make this all a bunch of stories instead of one story with chapters but I sure as sh*t ain't changing it now.
> 
> And if you're still here in the notes, pls pls let me know what you think!! and also if you'd want to see this all from the teams pov. Comments and Kudos feed my soul and I love you all.


End file.
